Brickfields to open as pasta and wine bar

Brickfields, the Chippendale café slinging Sydney's favourite
Persian love
cakes and some of the best bread in town, will
soon turn its hand to another incarnation of flour and water:
pasta.

Come spring, the sunny corner café plans to expand to a wine and
pasta bar with a licence for the good and gluten-loving times until
10pm.

"We already get a lot of grains in for the bakery - some really
nice semolina, for example - so we thought we should make some
pasta," says Brickfields owner and baker Simon Cancio. "The
cul-de-sac is such a good spot for people to be sitting about as
the sun goes down, enjoying the area and eating some tasty food
with nice drinks, too."

The evening menu will be short and sharp like the current lunch
offering, with just three or four simple pastas (breadcrumbs,
anchovies and capers, say, or classics such as cacio e pepe) and a
schnitzel made with leftover breadcrumbs from the bakery. The front
pastry counter will swap bread and cakes for European-style bar
food such as pickles, grilled fish and vegetable mezze, all to be
enjoyed with the café's bread.

Brickfields has welcomed a new pasta machine and extruder to the
fold, and Cancio has called on friend of the bakery and former
Sagra head chef Glenn Choy to help develop the menu. "We want to
get away from the cured-meat board thing and offer people a really
simple, fulfilling bowl of pasta to have with a wine or whisky,"
says Cancio.

As for the "source of the sauce", he says, they will install
taps for locally made beers (from The Grifter and Batch Brewing
Company) and the wine will be a similarly small but interesting
line-up. "We're calling on a few winemaker friends to help. We want
each wine to be quite different and unique in its own way, so you
can explore a little."

The plan to open nights has been three and a half years in the
making, and Cancio's focus right now is on formalising the
licensing agreement. "The police have said there are 42 licensed
venues within a 500-metre radius and we don't need another one -
but that's just a speed bump."